You're never too young apparently

You're apparently never too young for a herniated disc, or in my case, two. I'm twenty three and I started training BJJ about a year ago. I became immediately addicted of course. Soon I was training every single day. I got into great shape. Made a lot of friends. Generally having a blast.

So about seven or eight months into training I started getting what felt like really tight hamstrings. Like a fool, I pretty much ignored it. I tried a little bit of stretching but it didn't really help. Kept on training. On January 31st I got my blue, and within two weeks of that my back was so bad I could not even walk.

Overnight it went from loss of flexibility and discomfort to agonizing pain and basically being crippled. I looked like an eighty year old man with scoliosis. I went from 6'1" to about 5'0" just from being hunched over. Couldn't sleep. Did an MRI and found two herniated discs. They put me on narcotics and put me in physical therapy.

Now after four months of therapy and going through withdraw from painkillers I am just starting to go back into jiu jitsu and only in a limited capacity. The moral of the story, you're never too young to get injured! You're not invincible. I wish so much that I had taken more action sooner. I was foolish. Learn from my mistake. Get chronic pain checked out. Train safe.

Can I ask how often you stretched your body in preparation for BJJ classes and sessions?..

I ask because just like any other martial art, it is good practice to make sure that you are using sufficient time to stretch your body to keep your martial arts techniques solid, and most importantly, to reduce the possibility of becoming injured.

That being said.. It doesn't sound like a progressive thing to me in the sense that it happened gradually over a period of time.. What it sounds like to me is that you straight up got injured to begin with and continued to train, knowing that you were hurt because something wasn't right.. So yeah.. Train safe.. If it looks like **** and smells like ****, then yeah.. It probably is ****.

Can I ask how often you stretched your body in preparation for BJJ classes and sessions?..

I ask because just like any other martial art, it is good practice to make sure that you are using sufficient time to stretch your body to keep your martial arts techniques solid, and most importantly, to reduce the possibility of becoming injured.

Warming up before physical activity is a good thing.Stretching before physical activity, particularly static stretching, is a bad thing.

We do about 15-20 minutes of Yoga before each class. It is often proceeded by a warm-up for 5ish minutes. Is this a good thing? How does it fit into what you just said?

If the yoga at my old BJJ school didn't cost $20 a shot, I'd probably have done that.

My idea of a good warm-up is that it should prepare you for the work to come. You should be physically warmer, limber and loose, and have worked (gently) through the required ranges of motion. This has the added bonus of revealing several kinds of issues before you're going full speed, so you can deal with them rather than aggravating them during exercise.

Wish the wrestling coaches at my junior high had understood this. I might have done it instead of football.